Jeff Bezos has pledged more money to fight climate change than any person ever has. The question is, where will it go?

From the Atlantic:

Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon and the world’s richest man, announced yesterday that he would give $10 billion to fight climate change. He didn’t say much else. It’s not clear where the money will go, or how fast Bezos will spend it. He didn’t lay out a theory of change. In a 127-word Instagram post that doubled as a press release, he said only that a new entity, the Bezos Earth Fund, would support “scientists, activists, [and] NGOs—any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world.”

This gift is undeniably important. It could, by some estimates, virtually double the amount spent on climate change by American philanthropists today. And it will likely reveal something counterintuitive about the state of global climate action. Even if you believe, as Bezos does, that climate change is “the greatest threat facing our planet,” spending $10 billion to fight it is still pretty difficult.

Why? The first issue is organizational. “Dropping a big, fat check into the water is not necessarily going to make the sharks all swim in the same direction. It’s going to be either a feeding frenzy or a total mess until things get sorted out, and unfortunately we don’t have time to waste,” Daniel Firger, the managing director of Great Circle Capital Advisors, a climate-finance consulting firm, told me. (Until last year, Firger worked for the climate philanthropy of Michael Bloomberg, the Democratic presidential candidate and former New York City mayor.)

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